If anyone needs a new reason to cry over these two today, just remember that the modern-era Will of the TV adaptation took this photo of the Tower of the Angels on the day he and Lyra first met. Meaning that he’s got a photo of Lyra that he probably doesn’t even remember taking, and on some uneventful, monotonous day when he’s back home and absently flicking through his phone he’ll find it. He was in a rush to catch up with her, he remembers, so it’s not a very good photo - a little blurred, taken at an odd angle. Lyra’s not even the focus of the picture; she’s turned away from him, her face completely hidden, Pan almost cut out of the frame entirely. But it’s unmistakably her.
The first time he stumbles across it, Will can hardly bear to look at it. But he keeps the photo always, makes multiple digital and physical copies just in case. Sometimes it hurts to look at. Sometimes it brings him comfort. He takes a copy to Mary Malone and she tacks it up on her laboratory wall. On one of the less painful days he shows it to his mother and laughs as he tells her the story of how she attacked him when they first met.
And on more than one Midsummer’s Day he takes it with him to the Botanic Garden.
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Then Lyra took one of those little red fruits. With a fast-beating heart, she turned to him and said, “Will.”
And she lifted the fruit gently to his mouth.
She could see from his eyes that he knew at once what she meant, and that he was too joyful to speak. her fingers were still at his lips, and he felt them tremble, and he put his own hand up to hold hers there, and then neither of them could look; they were confused; they were brimming with happiness.
Like two moths clumsily bumping together, with no more weight than that, their lips touched. Then before they knew how it happened, they were clinging together, blindly pressing their faces toward each other.
The Amber Spyglass, Chapter Thirty-Five: Over the Hills and Far Away (2000) // His Dark Materials, Season Three, Episode Eight: The Botanic Garden (2022)
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HIS DARK MATERIALS | panjava + the circle of love, living, and death for @willsilvertongue
vladimir nabokov, letters to véra || @filmnoirsbian || simone de beauvoir, diary of a philosophy student: vol. 1 || e.e. cummings, vision || clementine von radics, in a dream you saw a way to survive; “the fear” || philip pullman, the amber spyglass || andrea gibson, the madness vase; “two birds” || alejandro jodorowsky, what is love? || octavio paz, tr. by eliot weinberger, “letter of testimony” || claudia rankine, “some years there exists a wanting to escape...” || philip pullman, the amber spyglass || anaïs mitchell, hadestown; "road to hell (reprise)"
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So one thing I've been thinking a lot recently, regarding His Dark Materials, is the way Lyra and Will's last kiss, the one with the doorway between worlds, parallels Marisa and Asriel's one in Northern Lights, in the sense that they are the complete opposite of one another.
Aside from the fact that they both happen in front of a portal, and that it is heartbreaking because neither of them would pass together thought it, think of this :
The odds have always been against Marisa and Asriel's relationship. First because she was married, and then the whole scandal and the shame that came after, and the hate and all that. There was not one time when the odds were on their side. Meanwhile, Will and Lyra's romance was written in the stars. They were tied together by fate, and so there was never any chance that they wouldn't be together.
And then comes the point where they are both standing in front of those gates, together, and suddenly there is nothing that's keeping Marisa and Asriel from being together. They have managed to get there on their own - now, they have the chance to continue together. Will and Lyra, on the other hand, are standing there for the sole purpose of the fact that they can't, after all, be together, even thought it was written in the stars and it was their destiny.
Marisa refused to go with Asriel because she doesn't dare to, or because she wants to find Lyra, according to either the book or the TV show. Asriel doesn't protest to that because he has a war to wage. They let each other go and missed the only chance they had at a fresh start because they loved other things more, because they would not put each other first.
However, Will and Lyra didn't want to join one another because their lives would be shorter, and their death would pain the one who survived, were they to live in the same world. They accepted that they couldn't be together, and let each other go, because there was no one else they loved more.
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